"You have a face. It's the face of a woman who got laid this morning and is trying to pretend she didn't."
She laughed into her mug. Moose shifted under the table, resettling against my ankle with the sigh of a dog who had heard everything and judged none of it.
We talked for a while. The clinic, which was booking out two weeks now, had Astrid running from seven-fifty to past six most nights. A golden retriever with pancreatitis who had eaten an entire stick of butter off somebody's counter. Easton's shift schedule. My mother, who had called twice this week about a Wednesday knit-along she was launching atThe Yarn Room,and who wanted Astrid to come, which was Colleen for I want you in a chair where I can gently interrogate you about married life.
"She means well," Astrid said.
"She always means well. That's the part that gets you."
Astrid smiled.
"So," she said. "You and Duke."
She said it lightly. No weight on it. Just a fact, offered back to me the same as she'd offer me the cream.
I could have deflected. I had a dozen lines ready—he's annoying, nothing happened, I was holding his tie because he was impaired. I'd been running them in my head ever since that day, sharpening them against an audience I hadn't faced yet. But this was Astrid, and Astrid had never once required me to perform for her, and I was too tired to hold the door shut with my best friend sitting three feet away.
“Alright, you got me. We slept together. Once. In the morning, we agreed it was a one-time thing, made a pact, and that was that.”
Astrid laughed. Not the polite version.
"What?" I said.
"Nothing."
"Astrid."
"Nothing, Audrey. I'm not saying anything."
"Say it."
"I'm not saying it." She pressed her lips together and looked at her coffee, and the laugh kept going at the corners of her mouth, even after she'd stopped making noise.
I waited her out.
She sobered eventually and set the mug down. "You know I'd be okay with it, right?"
"Astrid, I would rather be eaten alive by a bear than date Duke Rhodes."
"That's specific."
"I've given it thought."
"He's a good person, Audrey."
"He sent me a counter-playlist with seven Springsteen songs on it. Seven. He argued with me for two weeks about buttercream. He has opinions about font sizes."
"So do you."
"That's different. My opinions are correct."
Astrid was smiling at me—the smile she had when she could see through me and was choosing not to say so. I loved her for the choice. I also needed her to stop, because if she kept looking at me like that, I was going to tell her the thing I couldn't tell her.
My period was six days late.
I'd noticed on Thursday. I'd been in the bathroom before a shift, and the calendar app on my phone gave me the small red notification I usually ignored because my cycle ran like clockwork, twenty-eight days, give or take one, for the last ten years. Six days was not give or take one. Six days was a number that meant something, and I knew exactly what it meant. I'd been telling myself it was stress for five of those six days.
I was telling myself it was stress right now, sitting across from my best friend in her kitchen, her face holding the expression of a woman who wanted to know if I was okay and trusted me to tell her when I was ready.
